


This Is War

by PoppyAlexander



Series: Bleed So Pretty: A Collection of Fight!lock Stories [6]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Blood and Injury, Bottom John, But Still There's Biting, Cutting, Dark, Despite His International Reputation, Downward Spiral, Eating Disorders, Fight!lock, Fighting Kink, Hand Jobs, Injury, John Still Doesn't Think Sherlock's Clever, M/M, Masturbation, Mutual Masturbation, Punching, Rough Sex, Sabotage, Scratching, Self-Harm, Slightly Less Biting Than Usual, Switching, Threats, Top Sherlock, Unsafe Sex, Voyeurism, dark!Sherlock, dark!john, dirty tricks, fightlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-07
Updated: 2014-06-14
Packaged: 2018-02-03 17:15:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1752518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoppyAlexander/pseuds/PoppyAlexander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Sherlock bring out the worst in each other, and so begins a downward spiral.</p><p>AU - Fight Club</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One Thursday

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Five Times Sherlock And John Met Cute (And One That Was Decidedly Un-cute)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1288150) by [PoppyAlexander](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PoppyAlexander/pseuds/PoppyAlexander). 



> This story contains explicit descriptions of self-harm/cutting, and less explicit references to anorexia/eating disorders. If you could be triggered to the point of feeling or being in danger by such discussion, please move along. You are more important than my smut. I'm not kidding.

-0-X-0-

_I’m (fairly) pure of heart. . .And you're Rudolf Valentino. . .I hate you so hard I see stars. . .I’m here—just the one you waited for (all your life). . .I'll knock you out and up. . .THIS IS WAR. . .I’m here—the answer to all your prayers (at gunpoint). . .I'll knock you out and up. . .THIS IS WAR._

_\--Kristeen Young, "This is War"_

-0-X-0-

 

A woman in the clinic, trying to convince John her children needed to be hospitalized. Just overnight, so he could run more tests, innit, cos they’s always, always sick, and they don’t look too bad at the moment but if only he’d check them again, sometimes—a lot of times—they wake up at like, one, two in the morning, yeh?, just so sick. So maybe see them at night like that, yeh?

The kids were sitting on the exam table, clutching the stickers John had given them—Spider-Man for the boy, and at first one of those princesses (princess what? Not Snow White, he knew. Princess Fuck-All) for the girl, until the boy spoke up that she’d rather have Batman. They were two and three, and they were eerily fucking quiet, just staring down at their stickers, passively letting John listen to their lungs and look in their noses. They didn’t even crack a smile when he did the voice, the hilarious voice all the kids howled over. The mother was skin and bones, hair scraped too tight against her scalp, tortured with bleach and hot curling whatever-they-weres. Her eyes were ringed in electric blue and the dark brownish-red line around her mouth looked tattooed on. John could tell she was tweaking; she talked a mile a minute. The contrast between her and the children bordered on terrifying.

John tried to explain that he couldn’t admit the kids when they were not presently ill, but if they did have symptoms overnight she should not hesitate to bring them to the ED right away. The mother started to cry. John passed her a substandard tissue from a thin cardboard box, then excused himself. He asked the receptionist to call a social worker, swallowed the last of a cup of cold tea he’d stashed on a shelf by her phone, and returned to the exam room. The kids were still sitting quiet as stones on the exam table, not even rustling the paper cover on it. The mother—of course! Fucking _of course_ she was!—was gone.

And it was only 9:45.

By the time he got back to 221B that evening John was a borderline-criminal combination of ravenously hungry, stressed to his limit, and tired down to his bones. The only thing for it was to have a good wank and go to bed. He stalked straight up the stairs past the lounge and the kitchen to his room. Sherlock’s bedroom door was half open but John couldn’t tell whether he was inside it or not. He toed off his shoes while his laptop fired up. Web, homepage (blog). . .now what the fuck was _this_?

Every single one of John’s blog entries was gibberish. Utter nonsense. A computer virus? Some hacker attack thing? John stared, felt a vein in his neck throbbing. One thing he did not fucking need at the moment was some bloody IT problem to sort out. The longer he stared, though. . .

Now he could see it wasn’t gibberish, not exactly—it was just that his blog entries were reversed. All the words were there, it was just that each one was now spelled backwards. Even the punctuation was still correct.

“Bloody. . .” John muttered through clenched teeth.

And then he noticed that every now and again a single letter appeared in **bold**. Oh, that was very fucking cute, wasn’t it?

 **C O L D**. . .wait, he missed one. **U**. **COULDNT**. . . **Y O**. . . **U S** . . .

His eyes scanned, he missed a few but picked up the thread of the message pretty easily.

Yeah, obviously, “ **couldn’t you just**.”

 **P U N H** , no missed another, **punch**. **S O M E** —

**Couldn’t you just punch someone?**

Yeah, he fucking could **just punch someone** at the moment.

John cleared his throat. He didn’t shout but said loud enough that Sherlock would hear—if he was, in fact in his room, which John now knew he must be.

“Think you’re fucking funny.”

No reply.

“Oughta come down there and smash the grin right off your face.”

Silence, then possibly the slightest creak of a door or a floorboard.

“I should kick you until you fucking apologize.”

A pause. Still nothing. John’s prick stirred behind the fly of his trousers. _Oh, fuck, what if he’d messed with the. . ._

John clicked, typed. Every website URL he tried—other than his blog—directed him back to some bloody cartoon drawings of pink and purple, what were they, unicorns? horses? some ridiculous kiddie shit.

“Fucking big joker you are, gorgeous. See how funny you think it is when I come down there and put bruises all over your pretty pale skin until you beg me to stop.”

Another pause. Then:

“Not to stop.”

*

Flurry of activity. Noises. Shapes and colours shifting in Sherlock’s peripheral vision. John is late for work. He slept in Sherlock’s bed, bled on Sherlock’s pillow. Anyone who asks how his eye was blacked will get a series of harrumphs followed by a lie. John will keep his head down. He does not have time to shave. He does not say goodbye. Does not, in fact, say anything to Sherlock at all, merely curses himself under his breath, curses the clock, the kettle, his bag, his shoes. He curses the kitchen door as he yanks it open. Down the stairs, out the front door, slams it behind him.

Chin-ups while the tea steeps. Sit cross-legged in pleasingly rectangular, mid-century leather armchair. It looks cheap, even secondhand, but it is actually a valuable antique; and the scent of it, when Sherlock presses his nose to it, stirs an immediate reaction in his cock; he has been bent over it many times, had his face held down against it, sucked in its mingling aromas of salt, meat, formic acid, lacquer. . .

Sip tea at civilized pace. When tea is done, press-ups.

Shave, sit-ups, then shower.

Sherlock becomes so paralyzed with indecision when faced with the open doors of his wardrobe, he lingers—staring, mind adrift—for thirty-seven minutes before he gives it up for lost. He retrieves his pyjama bottoms from the bathroom floor, a t-shirt from under his pillow (stained now with John’s blood, dried brown around the edges, still red and damp in the middle, smelling strongly of copper and vaguely of decay), slips back into them. More sit-ups, then he begins to pace.

Sherlock paces the flat, in a near-trance, brain racing through geometric proofs, phylum/order/class/family/genus/species, negative medication interactions, that situation in Hong Kong, the prix fixe menu at Le Cygne, Inquisition-era  modes of torture (and their modern equivalents—technological advancements served as often to complicate as they did to streamline), the bruises on his hip in the shape of John’s fingertips. . .

When he has finished pacing, it is nearly three o’clock.

Text John.

_Fuck off, you. Did I even give you my number?_

Text Lestrade.

_Not at the moment, Sherlock. So sorry._

Sherlock drops his phone beside him on the mattress. His brain is racing in a small, tight circle around _Fantasie Brillante sur la Marche et la Romance d’Otello de Rossini, Op.11_ and it would be pleasant if it weren’t so painful because he can see every note, not a dot on paper, but a disruption in the air—something with weight and mass, fluttering, shivering, stabbing—and it gives him a headache. When he closes his eyes he can still see it, only louder.

Sherlock is circling the Othello fantasy for the fourteenth time, when at last comes something different: John’s key in the door downstairs. There is something Sherlock meant to do today, actually do, something that would have required concentration and decoding and some level of challenge, but whatever it was, he did not do it. If John has come back from work, it is already evening. Today is over and what was to be done today cannot, anymore, be done today.

As John ascends the stairs, Sherlock shuts his bedroom door but does not lock it. He needs something, _and_ he needs the door shut, _and_ he needs to not hear and see and taste the Ernst fantasy anymore but it will not leave him, it is trapped: a small, fluttering thing beneath a wet velvet blanket—struggling, struggling, but it cannot escape. Sherlock slides open the slim drawer in the side table, nudges aside condoms and lubricant in foil packets, a cigarette lighter, a box of sewing needles, until he finds the blade he keeps there, tucked into a folded piece of clear cellophane that once hugged a packet of cigarettes.

John is moving in the kitchen. Glass noise, countertop noise, cutlery noise, microwave beeping and whirring and beeping again. More glass noise. Water.

Sherlock’s mind is still stuck in the deep rut it has worn around the Ernst. He will carve a way out.

The sting of relief, the hot aroma of salt and metal. And again. And again. . .And the Othello fantasy is at last dying away, quieting, settling down out of the air, dissipating like a puddle soaking into soil. Another quick slip across his skin and it is free, it is gone, and all that Sherlock hears in his head is a pleasant, low hum: not musical, only soothing because it doesn’t change and it doesn’t demand anything. He carefully licks the blade clean, slips it back into its cellophane packet, a reminder of past pleasures surrendered for the benefit of. . .Sherlock can’t remember the benefit. Something. Mycroft knows.

Two heavy thuds against his door; John does not try the knob.

“Gonna watch some telly—maybe the cage fighting? If you’re interested.”

Sherlock barely hears John’s voice over the hum in his head, which is good, because usually he barely hears him over the Ernst, the geometry, that situation in Hong Kong. The t-shirt will cover the newly opened wounds—clearly not the result of anything other than Sherlock’s purposeful intention to release the notes of the Othello fantasy. But they are shallow and won’t bleed for long. He rises, and his slender feet carry him to the lounge, and he curls up in the leather armchair, sucks in its arousing aroma, and John turns up the volume of the television set, and they do not speak.


	2. One Monday

 

 

Whoever John had heard in Sherlock’s room the previous night when he came in was gone now. Sherlock was dressed in one of his designer suits, first few buttons of his tailored shirt left open, the leather of his shoes looking soft as butter. His every movement was efficient, precise, and now that he was dressed and his hair was combed, he even looked taller. There was something in his eyes John didn’t trust, though, a disingenuous glimmer.

Sherlock rubbed his palms rapidly together, _Oh goody goody we’re in for a treat!_ , and looked so self-assured, so smug.

“Case on,” he said, not really to John, though it was meant for John to hear. “It’s a good one. Lots of moving parts. Could get me killed, but—“

“If you have a choice, choose stabbing.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed and he stopped speaking. John stood over the sink, chewing his toast.

John had come in late, nearly midnight, and the flat was dark except for one metal banker’s lamp on Sherlock’s desk, aimed at the wall. He ran the kitchen tap for a glass of water, still had his bag on his shoulder, then went to the bathroom medicine chest for paracetamol; his head was pounding. He was about to retreat upstairs when he heard Sherlock’s voice in his room—low, quiet, urgent—but John couldn’t make out words. A staccato rhythm like sobbing. Another voice, a man’s, but also too quiet for John to discern, rumbling over top of Sherlock’s. Sounds of the bed shifting, groaning, in ways with which John was intimately familiar. He leaned close to the closed door, craned his neck, turning his ear toward it. His cock stirred a bit, and his neck felt hot. Not jealousy. Just a memory of Sherlock—lip split and bloodied, bruises on his chest and calf, flat on his back with his ankles on John’s shoulders and a murderous look in his eyes that made John want to bite him on the face.

Another burst of rhythmic vocalizations from Sherlock, the other man’s voice almost crooning in response. Why were they being so fucking quiet, John wondered. Even if they didn’t go at it with fists and feet like he and Sherlock did. . .

Just then a louder, higher-pitched whining sound from Sherlock that made John’s cock positively ache, and he moved away as quietly as he could, still holding the two headache pills in one hand, the glass of water in the other. He quickly dispensed with them, swallowed hard. As he set the glass on the kitchen countertop, something caught his eye and before he’d given it a thought, he’d flipped open a dozen test tubes with his thumb, one after the other— _pop! pop! pop!_ —and dumped their contents into the sink. He clicked them shut again, dropped them back in the rack, not bothering to be gentle. Sherlock wouldn’t hear it anyway, given the bed’s sounds and the ongoing rumble of voices, now closer to a normal volume, but still much quieter than what John had thus far known to go on in Sherlock’s room.

John went upstairs, pushed the door up against the frame but didn’t engage the knob—just in case there was anything really good to hear—quickly  undressed and lay on his bed, fumbled on his nightstand for lube, slicked up and began to pull. It didn’t take much (he went into the memory banks and stirred together a couple of blokes’ anatomies with that time he’d fucked Sherlock in his cousin the priest’s fucking _church_ , layered over top of it the fake but enthusiastic fuck-noises of his junkie prostitute neighbor up in Berwick and came spectacularly all over his belly), and once he’d finished, he rolled onto his front and fell asleep without cleaning up or even turning out the light.

John tossed the last corner of the toast crust into the sink.

“So who were you fucking last night?” John asked, not casually but not accusingly either. “And where is he now?”

Sherlock’s narrow eyes flashed momentarily and for the most fleeting, tiny instant, he looked caught-out. After that flicker had passed, though, he was right back to the expression of haughty smugness—the one that went with the suit.

“You were listening outside my door,” he said, and his condescending, know-it-all tone rubbed John up in just the wrong way, practically made him shudder.

“That’s a bluff. You’re guessing. You didn’t even hear me come in last night.”

Sherlock didn’t acknowledge John’s having brushed aside his deduction. “It was no one. Just a hook-up.” He shook his mobile a bit, to indicate he must have one of those cruising apps, then slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket. “He left right afterward.”

“Sounded very romantic,” John said with a raised eyebrow and a half-smile conveying his distaste at the idea of romance.

Sherlock’s face opened in a patently false, _aren’t you charming?_ expression, and he practically sing-songed, “Fuck off.”

John only shrugged and blinked, brushing the whole thing aside.

“So! I know you like a bit of danger, Dr Watson,” Sherlock said then, making for his desk, shuffling papers, not actually looking at any or picking them up. “Care to accompany me?”

“I have less than zero interest in becoming a magician’s assistant,” John said levelly. “I have a real job.”

Sherlock’s shoulders moved infinitesimally. “Suit yourself.”

“One of these times your anonymous hook-up is going to rob you blind, you know,” John offered. “Or murder you. Maybe both.”

Sherlock passed close to John on his way out the door; John could smell his aftershave and see the last yellow-green shadow of a bruise on the edge of his jaw where John had punched him.

“I can handle myself,” Sherlock asserted in a dangerous, low rumble.

“Guess we’ll see,” John replied, and pressed Sherlock aside with the back of his hand on Sherlock’s arm.

*

The case is disappointing. Sherlock’s solved it by three in the afternoon, passed an awkward half-hour  drinking tea with Lestrade in the cafeteria at the Yard, then returned to the flat. He is barefoot, has doffed his jacket and left it. . .Somewhere. Landing? He’ll find it later. He is folded up in the leather armchair, silently fingering the neck of his violin: Ernst’s Othello fantasy. It won’t leave him alone. His fingers are tired; he’s been at it too long, and it is a difficult piece.

John arrives home from the clinic and Sherlock knows from the time it takes him to unlock, pass through, and shut the front door and by the rhythm of his footfalls on the stairs, that it has been an easy but dull day. John likes to be exhausted, used up. Today, he is not. Sherlock studiously does not look up as John comes in, instead fixes his gaze on the exertion of his fingers against the violin strings.

John drops his bag on the floor beside the hall tree, trance-walks straight to the fridge.

“Why does this say, ‘not rice?’ Oh, for _fuck’s_ sake!”

Sherlock bites down on a grin. John was fully warned it wasn’t rice; he really needn’t have looked inside to confirm.

“That’s my appetite gone, then.” John crosses into the lounge, drops into the threadbare armchair opposite Sherlock. He juts his chin toward Sherlock, tucked up in the chair with his feet under him, holding his violin. “What’s this about?”

Sherlock meets John’s gaze, straightfaced, says nothing.

John looks annoyed, even mildly disgusted. Sherlock’s fingers are still moving, though he is fingering the Ernst at half-tempo, now, because John’s presence is distracting. There is an ache in Sherlock that would only be alleviated by backhanding John across the face, though Sherlock is waiting for a clue so as to discern whether it would be welcome.

Sherlock tips his head quizzically, which makes John’s expression even more contemptuous.

“Don’t do that right now,” John demands.

“Do what?”

“The thing you do. The trick. Where you get information out of people then feed it back to them in a way that makes them think they didn’t give it to you in the first place. Like those quack psychics on telly who claim they talk to the dead.”

Sherlock exhales hard through his nose. His fingers have stopped moving but are pressing down hard against the violin strings, turning white, though the calluses there mean he doesn’t feel it.

John is still talking. “ _I see a man or a woman, whose name starts with P or N, or fucking I don’t know, R, or. . .Is it T? Do you know a Thomas?_ Who doesn’t know someone named Thomas?” he scoffs. “That’s all you do—it’s just you talk about the dead instead of to them.”

Sherlock swallows a burning lump in his throat. He wants to jam his knee into John’s belly right below his ribs, take the wind out of him.

“And now you’re pouting,” John says accusingly, and his eyes are dark. “You know, gorgeous: when you’re not on a case you’re honestly like a bloody teenage girl.”

Sherlock lowers the violin to the floor, shelters it beneath his chair, sliding it with his long fingers.

“Am I,” he says flatly.

“Yeah, you fucking are,” John says, sounding irritated, as if this is a fact of which Sherlock was surely already aware. “With the sulking, and the drama, and your forty-seven different sullen looks—“

Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“There’s one,” John says immediately, then goes on. “And testing me with the ‘gone to Nigeria’ bullshit.” John switches to a simpering tone Sherlock sincerely hopes is not meant to be an impression of him. “ _I thought you might change your mind about moving in when I wasn’t here. . ._ ” John shakes his head, switches back to his normal voice. “And let’s not even start with the anorexia, and the self-mutilation. You know that’s what little girls do to get their daddies’ attention, don’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“I mean, really,” John says, with a contemptuous glare; the glare deforms Sherlock’s bones ever-so-slightly—he can feel it happening. “Be a fucking man. You’re a grown man, gorgeous. Try acting like it, for god’s sake.”

Sherlock launches himself at John, covering the space between them in the time it takes to blink an eye. One hand clutches the back of John’s neck, the wide span of his hand gripping the back of John’s skull and the side of his jaw all at once. His other hand is folded into a fist the exact size and shape of a mallet, and he punches John’s face—hard— _once_ — _twice_ —before John finally reacts, jabbing hard at the side of Sherlock’s torso, causing enough pain to momentarily distract him. Sherlock clamps both hands around John’s head then, holds him vice-tight. His stare burns, laser-like, hard into John’s dark eyes, which flicker with fury and desire.

“It’s a _man_ you want, is it?” Sherlock growls, inches from John’s face, one long leg folded across John’s lap, pinning him to the chair.

“Yes, I want a man,” John responds immediately, challenging Sherlock to rise to the occasion. John strains to raise his chin despite the tight grip of Sherlock’s hands around his face and head.

“I’ll show you who’s a man, then,” Sherlock mutters, moves to stand. He points to a spot on the floor between their two facing chairs. “There. At attention.”

John looks murderous, doesn’t move. But Sherlock knows this is what John wants. His deductions are not a parlour trick; he is not a fake psychic. He will give John what he has never said he wants, and John will know he is not a _fake_ anything. He is a genius. And he is most assuredly a man.

Sherlock smacks John roundly on the side of the head. “I said stand at attention, Captain.”

John looks for a moment as if he might go for Sherlock’s throat, but then all at once he rises, moves to the spot Sherlock has indicated, presses his shoulders back, holds his head high. Sherlock must let his lips part to accommodate the shift in his own breath at the sight of John’s posture, at his silent agreement that this is, indeed, what he wants. There is a tension in John’s body that clearly indicates he has not submitted, has not surrendered—at any moment he could uncoil like a spring and go at Sherlock furiously. Even as he has followed an order Sherlock has given, there is no mistaking that John’s intention—at least for now—is to go down swinging.

Sherlock walks a slow circle around John, comes to stop beside him, his chest facing John’s arm. His voice is low and level—perhaps even a step quieter than usual—as he says, “Get your kit off, Captain.”

John licks his lips, but otherwise he is still, eyes front, tall as he gets.

Sherlock takes one wide step in front of him and ( _at last!_ ) backhands him across the face. He roars, “ _Do it!_ ” and flecks of spit land on John’s cheek and chin. John works the pain out of his jaw as he quickly obeys Sherlock’s order, shucks his clothes in no time at all, returns to the required stance. His cock is flushed, thick and heavy with arousal.

Sherlock leans close to his ear, the rumbling thunder of his voice enough to retain command of the present situation, though John is clearly still poised to spring given the right opportunity. “Good lad,” Sherlock intones. “Do as you’re told, and I promise, it’s going to hurt.”

John gasps, but quickly regains himself.

“Don’t move,” Sherlock orders, then retreats to his bedroom where he fumbles in the nightstand. The blade is there, in its cellophane packet, a reminder, and Sherlock lifts aside the front placket of his shirt to look at yesterday’s wounds. They are scabbed, the skin pink around the edges—like cat scratches—and he feels something unwinding, low in the left side of his skull, a momentary twinge that is uncomfortable and foreign. He pushes the feeling away, takes what he needs from the drawer.

To Sherlock’s mild surprise, when he returns to the lounge, John has not moved. As soon as Sherlock is in striking distance, though, John swings a heavy left that catches Sherlock high on his chest; the button of his shirt will leave an impression on John’s knuckle, and on the skin sheathing Sherlock’s pectoral muscle. Sherlock moves quickly, and he is perhaps as surprised as John at how easily he is able to catch John’s arm, wrench it behind his back, grip the back of his neck in his other hand, and lean against John’s muscular back until he is bent forward against Sherlock’s leather armchair. John’s face ends up smashed against its back-cushion the way Sherlock’s own face has been, so many times he could not count. Sherlock’s cock surges against his fly, remembering, and now, watching. John is struggling beneath him, shoulders jerking, the muscles of his neck clenching and loosening. Sherlock shifts his grip and John moans with pain, then settles, a momentary surrender. But Sherlock knows John is merely waiting for an opportunity to turn the tables, to get his licks in. Sherlock drops his loot on the seat of the chair, holds John’s face hard against the leather cushion.

Sherlock presses his still-clothed pelvis against John’s bare ass, ruts against him. He shout-whispers into John’s ear. “You want a man, I know, to bend you over like this. To press his hard cock against you like this.” John sucks in a sharp breath.

Sherlock’s voice is demanding. “Don’t you.”

John groans.

Sherlock tugs at John’s bent-back elbow with a subtle, skillful motion. “ _Don’t you_.”

“ _Augh_ —Yes!”

“You want a man to give you orders.” Sherlock enunciates each word as if it is a threat.

“Yes,” John concedes, and his eyes close. “Yes.”

“Yes,. . .?” Sherlock prompts, and he releases John’s head—John doesn’t lift it from its place on the back of the chair. Sherlock scrapes his fingernails down the length of John’s arm, raises slender red welts.

John sets his jaw, shakes his head _no_. Sherlock is not his superior officer. Sherlock quickly thumbs open his bottle of lube, squirts some onto John’s low back right at the top of the cleft of his ass, rubs his fingers through it, slides them quickly downward, presses two fingertips against John’s opening but doesn’t penetrate.

John starts struggling anew, and with the arm not bent behind his back, he swings an elbow that catches Sherlock’s ribs.

“Shh,” Sherlock hisses into his ear. “Settle down and be a good boy.”

“Fuck y—“ is all John manages to get out before Sherlock has stomped with his heel on the bridge of John’s foot, and John howls.

Sherlock leans close to John’s ear again, “Now I’m going to let go of your arm but you’re going to _behave,”_ he scolds, “and brace yourself with both arms against the chair.” He gives John’s arm a final tug and John grunts, tries to jump away from the pain. “Am I fully understood, Captain?”

“Yes,” John spits out, his voice still indignant.

Sherlock releases John from his grip, guides his arm around so John is leaning both his folded forearms across the back of the (expensive, antique, utterly fetishised) armchair. Sherlock roughly strokes one long palm up the length of John’s neck, the wrong way through his hair, which is _ten days past due for a trim, what is he waiting for? Oh, of course, his paycheck_. Sherlock leans forward, surrounds John’s spine with his teeth, works through a few cycles of press and release. John groans indulgently at the pleasure, squeezes his fists in reaction to the pain.

“Good boy—doing as you’re told,” Sherlock says to the back of John’s neck, elegant fingers gliding along John’s muscular forearm from his wrist to his elbow. “Spread your legs.” There is a second when John does nothing; only his jaw twitches. Sherlock grabs hold of his ear with two bent fingers and a thumb, and twists hard. John’s head moves to follow, trying to undo the concentrated agony, and he cries out despite himself. He quickly slides his feet further apart, and Sherlock releases his ear, shoves the back of John’s head to press his face back down onto the leather. Sherlock’s slick, knobby fingers find their way back to John’s opening, and without prelude, he pushes two fingers inside. John gasps and his body thrums with an attempt to escape, though there is nowhere for him to go. Sherlock begins to twist his wrist and sweat breaks out across John’s upper lip and in his hairline.

John’s heels lift off the floor and his thighs shiver as Sherlock’s fingers rock in and back, pressing, exploring, and then he hits the mark, slides over and over it with his fingertips. John whines, bites the cushion of the chair. A steady drizzle of fluid leaks from the head of his cock, occasionally drips onto the floor or Sherlock’s pale, bare foot.

“You want a man to make you weak, I know,” Sherlock intones, sounding imperious, almost uninterested. His fingers keep sliding, and John is humming now, groaning low in his throat. Sherlock stills his hand, applies pressure. John whimpers. Sherlock slides his fingers back and away, nearly withdraws.

“No. . .” John protests, a ragged whine.

Sherlock yanks his fingers out, slaps John soundly on the hip; the sound of skin on skin is bright, electric. “You don’t tell me what to do!” Sherlock shouts. John sucks in a long breath, releases it in a broken huff.

Sherlock’s hands land on John’s shoulders and pull. “On your knees,” he barks, and John complies, seems grateful to shift position. Sherlock presents the front of his trousers and John goes straight for them, slides the hook free, tugs until the button gives, slides the zip down. Sherlock’s trousers puddle at his feet as John spits into his palm, reaches for Sherlock’s hot, hard cock, swipes Sherlock’s pre-cum across his fingertips and slides his hand down from the crown to the base of Sherlock’s dark pink erection.

“Suck it, Captain,” Sherlock says in a quiet voice full of danger. “And lick it.” Sherlock clamps one bony hand on the back of John’s head, pulls him closer. “Fucking swallow it,” Sherlock demands through gritted teeth. John tilts his face upward, eyes narrowed, jaw set. Sherlock meets his gaze, jabs a quick left that lands on John’s cheekbone and knocks his head aside; there is a cracking noise from John’s neck.

“That’s an order!” Sherlock roars, neck-veins straining, face going red, spit flying.

John quickly complies, rolling his tongue around the head of Sherlock’s cock, then dragging tongue and lips down along one side to meet his hand, still grasping the base. He works his way up and down and around, slicking Sherlock’s prick with his saliva, slipping his hand along the newly-dampened surface, feeling Sherlock’s skin slide slightly over the swollen tissue beneath. Sherlock’s mouth comes open; his breath is quick and shallow. His hand on John’s head tugs a firm reminder of what John should be doing.

John wets his lips with a wide swipe of his tongue, sucks in air like a man about to dive underwater, and sinks open-mouthed onto Sherlock’s cock, finding room for his tongue, minding his teeth, shifting his posture to open his throat. Sherlock lets out an appreciative groan.

“Good lad,” he says, and maintains a firm grip on the back of John’s neck, guiding, setting the pace. “I like you kneeling there,” Sherlock mutters. John strokes with his hand, tilts his head to make space, sucks hard as he draws back, presses his tongue as he slides forward again to meet the curled edges of his thumb and forefinger. He hums and moans around Sherlock’s length. He reaches for his own cock with his free hand, pulls roughly, jerking hard and quick, making himself moan louder, the vibrations of his throat and tongue jetting a shivering shock from Sherlock’s low belly all the way out through his limbs.

But John was not told to take matters into his own hands, and so all at once Sherlock grabs his ear again—it is still tender from being twisted earlier—and tugs him away, his cock sliding free of John’s mouth with a sloppy, wet sound. John moans in an entirely different way, and smacks at Sherlock’s thigh again and again, trying to distract him. Quickly stepping free of the tangle of his trousers around his ankles, Sherlock is suddenly a mad array of long limbs and sharp-knuckled fists and thick grunts of exertion as he grapples with John, dominating him, leaving marks on him, bending him into a pleasing shape.

John struggles cursorily, landing a few solid blows to Sherlock’s sternum and jaw, but Sherlock makes quick work of shoving John’s face into the seat of the leather armchair, encouraging him to grab on where he can, brace himself with hands wound around its metal framework, because Sherlock has already shoved John’s abdomen from underneath with one rangy knee to correct the angle, and now he expertly thumbs open the lube bottle again, squeezes a generous dollop into one hand. The bottle makes a sucking sound as he releases and drops it, and rolls slightly away, leaking onto the carpet.

“You want a man,” Sherlock says matter-of-factly, “to fuck you.”

John gasps out, “Yes,” and reaches again for his cock, winds his fingers around it. Sherlock allows it this time, neither says nor does anything to discourage him.

Sherlock has slicked up his cock until it glistens, and he works two fingertips around John’s opening, circling, pressing. He is kneeling behind John now, and with one strong arm around John’s chest, draws John back, up close against himself, looks over John’s shoulder and watches him jerking his heavy cock. Sherlock presses his teeth against the side of John’s throat and John makes a gratifying whining noise. Sherlock guides his own slippery prick into the cleft of John’s ass, slides it back and forth along the tight knot of John’s asshole. He presses his lips to John’s ear.

“Am I man enough for you, Captain?”

“Yes. . . _yes!_ ” John’s words tumble out nearly on top of each other, “Fuck yes.”

“Eyes front, soldier,” Sherlock demands, and John’s gaze tracks Sherlock’s long finger as he reaches in front to them to tap the edge of the leather seat cushion. “I want to see you biting this. I want you to lick it. I want you to suck in the smell of it.”

“Oh yes,” John acquiesces instantly, and he lets go of his cock to go searching for Sherlock’s—reaching, scrabbling fingers trying to get a grip on him, guide him inside.

“Don’t be greedy,” Sherlock scolds, and shifts his hips away a bit. “Behave yourself.”

John nods, his breath panting out through a dry mouth.

Sherlock releases his arm from around John’s chest and John falls forward gratefully, nuzzling his face into the crease between the chair’s arm and seat. He reaches with one hand for its metal leg and wraps his fist around it. Sherlock hums appreciation, grabs John’s hips and shifts him a bit; John isn’t fighting anymore.

“You want me to fuck you, soldier? Am I _man_ enough for you?”

John’s voice is muffled at first, his face still pressed against the welcoming leather of Sherlock’s favourite chair. “Oh, fuck, yes. . .” he moans.

“Say it, then,” Sherlock demands, and he guides his cock to John’s opening, and his fingertips begin to pry and prod and make room. “Say you want me to fu—“

“ _Fuck me_ , for jesus’ sake fuck me now!”

Sherlock’s cock presses partway in, and John holds his breath, rubs the side of his face against the chair, the stubble on his chin and cheek dragging pleasantly along its semi-slick surface.

“Tell me what you want, Captain,” Sherlock orders, shifting a bit, making John shudder and tighten around him, his body wanting to refuse.

“Oh god fuck me fuck me fuck me so hard,” John rambles, “I want it to hurt, I want you to come inside me, I want you to leave bruises. . .”

Sherlock shoves into him, steadily, deep, his long palms and elegant fingers spidered across John’s low back, pushing down.

John gasps, then spreads his knees wider. “Yes oh yes work your cock in me, god you’re so hard, make it hurt, fuck me fuck me fuck. . .” he runs out of breath before he runs out of words.

Sherlock obliges, leans forward and up, begins to thrust in earnest, recklessly, searching for a pleasing rhythm, heedless of whether John can keep up with him. Every now and then his cock slips across that crazymaking spot inside John and John gulps or howls or curses or—yes, he is a good lad, doing as he’s told—bites down on the leather chair cushion. John is pulling hard at his own cock, and neither of their movements are in sync with the other’s, each man taking his own pleasure, everything jagged and dissonant and not-quite-right.

John’s words roll out of his mouth in a rumbling, desperate whisper, “God you fuck me so good, gorgeous. . . good man, you are. . .jesus fucking-- . . .give it. . .yes— _yes, gorgeous_ —you’re gonna make me—“

John’s hand on his cock freezes, his back tenses, his head rocks side to side facedown against the leather seat of Sherlock’s chair, and he comes with a groan so heavy and thick it sounds like his whole life is riding out on the breath gusting out of him. Meantime, Sherlock has found exactly where he wants to be, and he pants in time with his sharp thrusts into John’s ass, and his panting turns to grunting with the effort, and his hand finds the back of John’s neck and holds him in place, the side of John’s face deformed against the black leather as Sherlock presses him down, fucking hard and urgent as John struggles to catch his breath, his thighs shaking with fatigue.

John’s tongue snakes out of his mouth and laps rhythmically against the leather, in time with Sherlock’s motions, and there is a slipping, sucking sound each time Sherlock pulls back, and all at once Sherlock is coming, shoving in to the hilt, his cock throbbing, swelling, pulsing inside John’s body as John continues to stroke his tongue against the seat cushion, and Sherlock knows exactly the tangy chemical taste of it, and he collapses backward onto his palms, his cock sliding out of John’s ass followed by a drizzling trail of sticky-slick lube swirled with creamy-white cum.

John is panting, still kneeling over the chair, and he slides his knees closer together, draws his legs into a slightly more comfortable position. Sherlock rises to stand, steps into his trousers and yanks them up. As he is fastening them, he swiftly raises one knee and stomps his long, bare foot down on John’s low back, making him rear up and cry out.

“That’s for fucking about with my test tubes,” Sherlock says evenly, and stalks off to his room. He shuts and locks the door and flops onto his belly across his bed. He does not fall asleep.


	3. One Friday

 

Morning. Sherlock has been called to a crime scene: two bodies found just after dawn, posed like mannequins in the window of Harvey Nichols. John is on his way to the clinic so as to assuage his guilt for some perceived _horror_ or—more likely— _failure_ he perpetrated during the war; Sherlock has not yet discerned the details behind his motives, but it is clear he works in Berwick for the money, but in London for his, what. Peace of mind. Pennance. For his _soul_.

They are walking out from Speedy’s together, each clutching his paper cup—John’s black coffee and Sherlock’s hot water with lemon-but-don’t-leave-the-lemon-in, and Sherlock chucks the coins he received as change from his fiver into the gutter, raises his hand and shouts for a taxi. John’s hand lands heavily on his arm.

“ _What_ \--?” he demands, and his face is reddening with anger. “What— _the fuck_ —did you just do there?” he demands, tipping his head toward the street.

Sherlock is puzzled, rewinds the scene in his mind. John’s body is taut with indignation, his eyes flashing daggers at Sherlock.

Sherlock’s forehead creases. “What? The coins? If I pocket them, the line of my trousers is ruined.”

“You throw _money_ in the gutter,” John says accusingly, voice full of disbelief of a very particular sort, nothing like: _that’s remarkable!_ but rather: _Never have I encountered a bigger asshole than you_.

Sherlock shrugs. “It annoys me. Someone will pick it up,” he offers. “Eventually. Probably.”

John huffs hard through his nostrils. “You care so little for money other people need so badly they will pick it up out of the muck, in the bloody _gutter_.”

“So?” Sherlock squints at John, then waves his arm again, and a taxi up the road starts to slow and pull over.

“You’re incredible. You know that.” John’s words and his tone do not match; Sherlock processes this.

The taxi glides up and Sherlock yanks open the door. Climbing in, he intones, “Don’t bother starting a class war with me, Dr Watson. You’ll find my side has already won. Run along now, and nurse the lepers; your reward waits in heaven.”

He settles into the seat, pulls the door shut. As the taxi pulls away, he spies in the driver’s mirror that John is furiously kicking the curb, his face contorted in anger. The plastic lid of his coffee cup flies off and hot coffee splashes his hand. He drops the cup into the gutter, curses, stomps on it. After a moment, he stoops to pick up the crushed coffee cup, as well as every last glinting coin of Sherlock’s small change.

*

John was still on a slow boil about Sherlock and his careless way with money. He had seven-hundred-pound suits custom made and left them in a heap in a corner. He took taxis everywhere, shoved twenty-pound notes at the driver and never waited for change. He paid some bloke in a ridiculous, poncey barber shop to shave him twice a week, for god’s sake. And to top it off, he threw actual money in the gutter as if it was garbage. It was repellant.

Sherlock was in his bedroom with the door closed and John was sprawled on the sofa with the remote in hand, scrolling through the far too many satellite channels (more of Sherlock’s money wasted). His mobile buzzed and he drew it from the hip pocket of his jeans.

CRUZR msg from DaRudeBoi:  Bit weird ques but iz U in Baker St?? 221???

John sat up a bit, squinted. He hadn’t used the app in a while, and only in Berwick, but apparently it was still tracking his location to show other users if he was nearby.

CRUZR reply from MadCap:  That is a bit weird, but yes.

DaRudeBoi:  That yr BF, then what’s askin 4 a hookup? Or iz U a gang of murderers settin me up?

MadCap:   We are not a gang of anything. Not my BF, just my flatmate. What name’s he using?

DaRudeBoi:  Just /SH/ innit. So if I come ova U ain’t gonna punch me, yeah? Just flatmates.

John quickly searched Sherlock’s profile. His photo was arty, black-and-white, only his neck and jaw. He described himself as a slim, tall, handsome switch—and a genius. Of course he fucking did. He was the genius of anonymous ass-fucking. What a prig.

MadCap: Sure, no worries, come over. Did I mention I was in the army?

There was a pause. John waited, cycled through a few more TV channels.

DaRudeBoi: Say more, if U want. I’m listenin.

MadCap: Clean. Muscular. Brutal. Ten inches.

There was barely a pause before the next message vibrated John’s phone in his hand.

DaRudeBoi: Tell Ur mate sorry. I’m 10 min away. C U soon big man.

John couldn’t help but laugh. He went into the loo to clean up a bit, swish some mouthwash. When he came out, he knocked on Sherlock’s closed door.

“Sorry about your date, gorgeous,” he enunciated. Silence from the other side of the door. John was about to move away from it when it swung open. Sherlock’s forehead was rumpled; his eyes narrowed to slits.

“What do you know about it?” he demanded.

John shrugged. “Got a message on CRUZR from a fella said you were chatting him up; he wanted to make sure we weren’t a couple.”

Sherlock, his mobile barely visible in one huge hand, threw his other hand up and looked heavenward. “The GPS,” he said, as if the phrase itself were a curse.

“All I had to say was ‘ten’ and he said to tell you sorry,” John said with a wicked grin. “So looks like I’ll be fucking and you’ll be wanking. We’ll try to keep the noise down.”

Sherlock punched him, a quick uppercut jab to the side of his torso, and John curled up around his fist, let go an audible _oof_. Before he could fully recover, Sherlock smashed him across the face with the phone still cradled in his palm. John got his wits back, balled up Sherlock’s shirtfront in his fists, tugged him hard and slammed him against the wall. A framed doily of Mrs Hudson’s jumped off its hook and crashed to the floor. John’s bent knee crashed into Sherlock’s thigh, just above his kneecap, and Sherlock shouted his pain, smacked one flat hand against John’s ear, which immediately started to ring. John shuffled sideways, off-balance, and Sherlock threw an elbow against his chin that sent him belly-down on the floor.

Sherlock was kneeling on one knee across John’s back, fumbling at the back of John’s head, trying to get a grip on his hair, intending to smash his face down on the linoleum.

“You boys _stop it right now_!”

Mrs Hudson, in the kitchen, in her housecoat and slippers (but still wearing lipstick), looking appalled.

“Sherlock Holmes, you get off him this instant,” she scolded. “What on Earth—“

Behind her—lurking—a tallish, youngish man in a tracksuit and Burberry-print cap, cigarette dangling from his lips.

Sherlock reluctantly did as he was told, and John got quickly to his feet, brushed off the front of his jumper, smoothed his hands through his hair.

Mrs Hudson snatched the cigarette from the young fella’s mouth. “No smoking allowed,” she said firmly, and flicked the cigarette into the sink. She ran the taps over it as she looked disapprovingly at Sherlock and John. “What are you two thinking? I’m not having that in my house. If you’re going to have a domestic you can go outside in the alley. By the bins. Like normal people.” Having finished disposing of the cigarette, she wiped her hands on a kitchen towel hanging on a hook by the sink and made for the door. “What will your guest think?” She shook her finger at them, went down the stairs. The door to her flat slammed.

John cleared his throat, moved toward the younger man, still hanging back in the lounge, sizing up the place, as well as John and Sherlock. John offered his hand for a shake. “I’m John. Er, ‘MadCap’? Sorry about this.”

“She said you’s ‘aving a domestic,” the guy said suspiciously. “You said he wun’t your boyfriend.”

Sherlock barked out a sarcastic laugh at this, moved into the kitchen and started rummaging in a drawer.

“Yeah, no,” John said, trying to arrange his face in a manner the young fella would not deem to be bloodthirsty, which was how John actually felt at the moment. “I assure you, he is not my boyfriend.” Whatever Sherlock had been looking for had been found; he slammed the drawer shut and moved to the sink, his back to the kitchen.

“Actually, he can’t stand me,” Sherlock intoned.

“Shut up, you.” John turned to the chav kid again, gestured upstairs. “My room’s private. Oh, but, can I get you something?”

“A lager wun’t go amiss,” the kid suggested.

Sherlock let out a disappointed-sounding hum, then pronounced, “He’s an alcoholic.”

John’s jaw twitched. He pasted on a grin. “Recovering alcoholic, he means. Anyway, no, sorry. No lager.”

The kid was looking increasingly skeptical. There was a sound from Sherlock, at the sink—the zip and whoosh of a wooden match striking.

John glanced back over his shoulder, turned back to the kid, did a double-take and looked back again. Sherlock’s shiny, gold money clip was on the countertop beside the sink, the folded pile of bills slid free and piled nearby. Sherlock was holding a fifty-pound note in one hand, dangling it by the corner, and to the opposite corner, he held the lit match.

“Is he--?” the kid started.

“A son of a bitch?” John finished. “Why, yes, he bloody is.”

Sherlock dropped the now half-engulfed note into the sink, picked up another fifty, set the same match to it.

“Is he burning fucking _money_?” the kid asked, in case his earlier meaning had not been clear.

“Sherlock.”

“I’ve got money to burn,” Sherlock offered, with one of his patently fake, overly wide grins. “So I thought, why not?”

“ _Sherlock._ ”

“What’s that phrase?” Sherlock asked rhetorically. The kid looked utterly spooked and actually took a step backward. “Ah, yes: More money than sense. That’s it.”

Sherlock dropped the burning note and the spent match into the sink, reached for the remainder of the pile: three or four notes, the only one of which John could see was a twenty.

“You complete and utter—“

“Sorry, mate, looks like you two _is_ havin’ a domestic. I’m out.” The young fella ducked out the door and his feet on the stairs were the quick one-two one-two rhythm of someone in a hurry to escape.

“Shit!” John finished. Or exclaimed. Even he wasn’t sure which. He spun on his heel, stormed over to Sherlock, too late to save any of the cash from extinction. John grabbed Sherlock hard by the upper arm, just above his elbow, and pulled him through the kitchen, to his bedroom, where he shoved him down onto his bed and Sherlock landed on his back, up on his bony elbows. John leaned close, grabbed Sherlock’s chin and jaw in one hand. He saw the planes and angles of Sherlock’s facial bones in sharp relief, and he wanted to positively _perforate_ the skin clinging to the surfaces.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he demanded, shaking Sherlock’s head in his grip.

“You wasted my night,” Sherlock retorted, unintimidated. “I wasted my money.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you,” John muttered, and thrust Sherlock’s face away from him. “You posh piece of shit.”

John was turning away, when Sherlock suddenly demanded, “Whose children are you supporting?”

John turned back to face him, shook one extended finger in his face, just once. “No.”

“Your lifestyle is minimal; you could afford to live on what you make at the clinic here in London.”

John’s voice was full of gravel and a threat of dire violence. “I. . .said. . . _No_.”

“What would make a man work three times more than is strictly necessary? Some sense of obligation, but to whom? Well, naturally a man with a family works to support them.”

“Stop it,” John warned, his chest heaving, heat rising up his neck to his ears.

“But you don’t have any photos of children, no mementoes, not even a crayon drawing, and a father would almost certainly have some reminder of his dear little ones around him at all times, so whoever they are, you are not their father.”

“I’ve told you you’re not clever,” John said, “Your magic trick doesn’t work on me. I’m not fucking impressed.” His fists were tightly clenched, though he kept his arms at his sides.

“They must not _have_ a father, or else he’d be supporting them. So: fatherless children you would feel obligated to support. Must belong to a close relative of yours, probably your brother, who was good-for-nothing, didn’t set them up to be cared for properly in the event of his death, must have been _such_ a lowly type that you even bear some sense of shame about him, feel you owe his children the things he didn’t bother to provide.”

“ _Enough.”_

“He was a drinker too, hm? Died in an accident—maybe a car crash? The wife was a homemaker, no skills, can’t support them on the kinds of jobs she can find, so Uncle John sobers up— _but quick!_ —and moves them to a decent neighborhood, nice schools, safe; pays the bills, buys the kiddies’ clothes and toys and bikes. . . The only thing I can’t figure is whether you fucked your brother’s wife while he was still alive, or you waited a respectful length of time after he was dead, you know, to properly mourn—“

John rained a storm of blows onto Sherlock’s face and head so devastating, so unrelenting, Sherlock only curled up, wrapped his arms around his head to shield his brain. John didn’t stop punching until he was too tired to punch anymore, and Sherlock lay unconscious on the bed.

John’s breath heaved, his eyes were blinded with tears, his heart was racing so he was sure he was having a heart attack. He stood with clenched fists and damp face, catching his breath, and once he was able to see again, he arranged Sherlock on his side, made sure his airway was clear, and left: the room, the flat, Baker Street.

John was sure of it now: he was going to end up killing Sherlock Holmes.


	4. One Tuesday

 

Back in the fluorescent-lit warehouse that tinged everyone sickly, near-frozen blue, Sherlock practically glowed; his lips were lilac and the ice-pale pupils of his eyes were barely discernible from the whites surrounding them. John was mildly relieved to see him still alive; once he’d punched Sherlock unconscious, John had marched straight out of the flat and walked the London streets until it was time to get the pre-dawn train back to Berwick, where he did his three-week stint as the village doctor. He’d returned to the flat only the previous night, but well after midnight, and gone straight to his bed. He left again early; Sherlock’s bedroom door was closed the entire time.

Sherlock approached, stood by John’s side, avoiding the confrontation implicit in being face to face. His face was open, placid, completely not what John would have expected; it didn’t seem possible Sherlock wouldn’t hold a grudge. John crossed his arms in front of his chest, kept his eyes focused on the bout going on a few yards away: evenly-matched, middle-class, middle-aged, suburban dad-types locked in seemingly endless grappling. Boring as hell and John wished for it to end.

“You have to at least tell me I was right, about your brother. And the children you’re supporting,” Sherlock intoned, louder than normal volume because of the racket made by jeering, shouting men surrounding the makeshift ring, but quiet enough not to be overheard.

“You already know,” John replied, lips barely moving.

“Well, and what about the wife?”

“Fuck off.”

Sherlock shrugged it away. “We can rearrange the list,” he offered, jerking his head back toward the entrance, where the schedule of bouts was stuck to the wall with chewing gum. As it currently stood, John and Sherlock were not going to fight each other.

John shook his head, still did not look at Sherlock. “It’s fine as is. It’s good.” What he did not say was that he was nearly sure he would never fight Sherlock again. He was considering moving back to his old London room, too—forgetting the name of Sherlock Holmes and everything that went with it, maybe even moving up to Berwick full-time. There was nothing for him in London, anyway. He couldn’t even remember anymore what had held him here. But he could not ignore that something in him, around him, was bending, creaking, about to break, and John thought he should prevent that happening. He just wasn’t sure _why_ he should.

“All right then. Watch and learn, Dr Watson,” Sherlock asserted, and John instantly wanted to kick him.

The ring-man called up Sherlock and his opponent, the same giant beast who had forced John to tap out a few months back. John noticed Sherlock slipped his wristwatch into the toe of his shoe, rather than passing it to John as he sometimes had in the past. John cleared his throat, focused his eyes. The ring-man raised his hand, lowered it, shouted “Fight!”

Sherlock hung back, sizing up the giant, his body sunk low on bent knees, a look of intense concentration on his face. The giant squared up his fists, seemed weirdly hesitant—he must have seen enough of Sherlock’s fights to not underestimate him based on his slim build and pretty face. They circled each other nearly 180 degrees, each man rotating slowly clockwise.

Sherlock shuffled forward, jabbed at the huge man’s jaw, connected, but the man’s head barely moved as he absorbed the blow. He answered with a quick one-two to Sherlock’s narrow chest, which drove him backward a few steps. Leaping forward again, though, Sherlock ducked very low and grabbed the beast around the knees, tugged, sent him to the floor hard on his back. Spider-like, long limbs that appeared to carry too many angles skittered atop the beast, and Sherlock was suddenly kneeling on his chest, pounding heavy punches onto his face one after the next in a workman-like rhythm. The giant grunted as each blow landed. John, watching from the second row of spectators around the chalk-drawn ring, cleared his throat and willed his stirring cock to quiet itself; he longed to feel Sherlock’s sharp knuckles against his jaw, his lips, the ridge of his eye socket, just as he longed to straddle Sherlock and rain his fists down on that angular, pale face and cover it with bruises and make it bleed.

John shifted his gaze to the floor.

The beast shoved Sherlock off his chest like he weighed nothing, _was_ nothing, and in an instant their postures were reversed: the giant was hovering over Sherlock, socking him in the chest, the neck, the face (Sherlock’s lip was bleeding; he choked out a series of rattling coughs to clear his throat). Sherlock took the only road open to him and went for the eyes.

The giant let out a shockingly high-pitched howl, grabbed his face, rolled off and away from Sherlock, who struggled to his feet. Sherlock pressed at the side of his torso with one hand, grimacing with every panted exhalation. John could diagnose the cracked rib even at his considerable distance.

The giant’s eyes were bloodshot and tear-filled, but he went at Sherlock like a train bearing down, and Sherlock couldn’t swerve away quickly enough given the pain in his side. The giant stomped on the top of Sherlock’s foot, followed with an elbow straight down in the crease between Sherlock’s shoulder and neck, which sent him to all fours on the floor. The beast jerked his knee forward and caught Sherlock across the face, and in an instant blood ran from Sherlock’s nose as well as his already-injured upper lip. Sherlock tried to spit but merely burbled; his eyes were hazy and unfocused. He was stunned. He swung one wild haymaker that landed ineffectually, high on the giant’s leg.

“Just lie down and sleep, Sweetheart!” someone shouted from the outer edges of the ring.

All at once, nearly blind with unexpected rage, John rushed forward, jumped on the giant’s back, clung around his neck with his left arm and pummeled the side of his head with his right fist. There was a rumble from the crowd, some protesting, some encouraging, and the ring-man raised his whistle, but the huge fella waved him off with one sweep of his hand. Sherlock crawled out of the ring and struggled to his feet some ways off, leaning against a cement post. The big guy yanked hard at John’s supporting arm, tilted his body forward in an attempt to dump John off him.

John slid to his feet, went at the guy’s considerable midsection with three uppercuts in a row, which would have incapacitated anyone with less mass, but which the giant merely grunted at. He got in a heavy left against John’s cheek and John felt his jaw slide too far to one side. John seethed with determination that this monster was not going to beat him again. If he could only get him on the floor, he could get in a knockout punch—he was sure of it.

The big guy tried to employ the technique he’d used to bring Sherlock down, raising one enormous foot to stomp it down on John’s, but John anticipated it in time to shift out of the way, and as the giant’s foot slapped down on the damp cement John went all-in with a knee to the groin. The big fella howled, bent forward, but kept his feet and answered John back by clapping him hard on both ears with the palms of his enormous, thick-fingered hands. John’s ears rang, he was dizzy, he stumbled and shook his head.

The giant punched hard into John’s gut, doubling him over, then an uppercut beneath his chin that rattled his teeth and made the sides of his neck pop. John stumbled back a few steps, trying to buy himself a second to recover, but the beast surged toward him. John threw a heavy right that landed on the giant’s cheekbone, and the pain in John’s fingers shot up his arm like electricity, and he felt it explode in his head, white light behind his eyes. He dropped straight to his knees before the giant had time to hit back, and he smacked his uninjured hand hard against the floor— _onetwothree_ —quick as he could, and the fight was over.

The crowd parted to allow John to stumble upward and out, barely breaking stride as he stooped to sweep up his shirt and shoes. He passed Sherlock, shoes in his hand, shirt draped over his shoulder, and made a follow-me motion with one arm. “Can you?”

Sherlock grunted affirmatively and the two of them shambled to the exit and out into the foggy chill.

They stopped in the parking lot and John managed to step into his shoes, guiding his feet in with his one good hand. His other hand was so swollen he could only bend his thumb, and that only partway; his pinky was dislocated and he shuddered at the thought of having to jerk it back into place. He sized up Sherlock, still clutching his side.

“Breathing OK?” John asked.

“Yeah,” Sherlock huffed.

“Want to make sure your lung’s not—“

“Punctured, I know,” Sherlock finished for him. “I think it’s just cracked,” he added, referring to his rib.

“Hurts,” John prompted.

Sherlock half-smiled, half-grimaced. “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “How’s the hand?”

John held up his swollen, wrong-angled hand.

“Smarts a bit,” Sherlock said with a knowing nod.

“A bit, yeah. Taxi?”

“I don’t think I can sit,” Sherlock said. “Shall we shuffle home instead?”

“Sure,” John agreed.

The two of them made their way back the few blocks to Baker Street, slowly, looking like the walking dead—one of Sherlock’s hands clamped across his chest to cradle his side, his shoes dangling from the fingers of the other. He limped on the tender, possibly-broken foot the giant had stomped on, slowing their pace. John staggered almost drunkenly; his balance was still off from the boxing of his ears. He propped his injured hand against his opposite forearm, wincing now and then as it shifted against his chest.

They struggled up the stairs and by the time they were in the flat Sherlock was moaning with every breath. He dropped his shoes on the lounge floor, leaned against the closed kitchen door, pale and sweating. John was not in any better condition; there was a pain radiating across his belly (muscles and soft tissue only, not internal bleeding, but it hurt like hell regardless) and of course, his hand. His jaw ached in a number of awful ways.

“Once you’ve caught your breath, I need your help,” John muttered, sinking into a kitchen chair, leaning back because to lean forward made the abdominal pain worse. “With my finger.”

Sherlock nodded. His face was creased in every way possible.

“I can get you something for the pain,” John offered.

“No.”

“Just an injection?”

“Definitely not an injection.”

John nodded. They stayed where they were for a few silent minutes, then Sherlock said, “What do I have to do?”

John described the motion using Sherlock’s own long, slightly bent pinky. “You don’t have to pull hard, but the quicker the better,” he said.

Sherlock watched John’s demonstration three times, then nodded.

“Here,” he offered, lifting his shirt from where it still hung over his shoulder, pressing it toward John’s mouth. “Bite on this.”

John accepted the offer, nodded, closed his eyes. Sherlock tugged steadily on his pinky, shifted it sideways. John screamed into the soft cotton of Sherlock’s shirt, bit down on a button. His head was light and his vision threatened to close down, but he took a look at the pinky and it looked about right. He strained to bend it and it went slightly in the right direction. He was almost certain his two middle fingers, though, were fractured, and the swelling all over his hand indicated soft tissue damage he would be dealing with for weeks. That bloke was a fucking mountain.

“I’ll give you a hand getting into bed,” John offered. “If you need it.”

“Might do,” Sherlock said. He headed first for the loo and John checked the freezer for ice he somehow knew would not be there. True to his suspicion, all he came across was a clear plastic container of what looked like cow’s eyes (he chose to believe they were from cows), and a pint of ice cream that looked like it had been burrowed straight down into with wooden dowels. Or, more likely, with Sherlock’s skinny fingers.

*

Sherlock emerges from the bath with the hair around his face damp; he has splashed himself with cool water, cleaned the blood from his cut lip and below his nose. John follows him into the bedroom, where Sherlock unfastens his trousers and lets them fall.

“What happened here?” John asked mildly, sounding curious but not concerned, as he offers Sherlock his bent forearm to grasp. Clearly he has noticed the marks across Sherlock’s buttocks and thighs—faded suggestions of straight, horizontal lines—old bruises, more green than blue.

Sherlock grimaces, curses. “ _Ah!_ Dear Christ, that hurts. . .” He lies back slowly, wincing, torso held stiffly so as to minimize disturbance to his injured rib. “It’s nothing,” he says dismissively. “Cane. Just playing. Nevermind it.”

“Playing with who?” John asks, and Sherlock can see the crease of doctorly concern forming between his eyebrows. “Hooking up for that sort of stuff is chancey.”

“Nevermind. Fuck off. Not your problem.”

Sherlock is at last flat on his back, raises one hand behind his head, rearranges his pillow.

“It _is_ a problem, though?” John asks. He arranges the covers over Sherlock up to his waist, and Sherlock catches John's quick glance down between Sherlock’s thighs. Despite the agony elsewhere in his body, his prick is slightly full, resting heavily against his inner thigh.

“No. That was the wrong word.” Sherlock corrects himself. “Not your _business_.”

“Fine,” John acquiesces. He moves to the other side of the bed, turns the blanket back.

“What are you doing?” Sherlock asks. They have never shared a bed except to fuck; if one passes out, the other leaves. It is one of the many unspoken rules.

“Not going up and down more stairs than I need to.” John uses his good hand to unfasten his trousers, shoves them down along with his boxers, and steps out of them. “Move your foot.” He slides down beside Sherlock on the narrow mattress. Their shoulders and upper arms touch for a moment until John shifts himself slightly away. Once he has settled the sheet and blanket over himself, John reaches for the lamp and clicks it off. The room is windowless, utterly dark.

“You didn’t have to—“ Sherlock says quietly. The darkness seems to want whispering.

“I owed that bloke one; guess now I owe him two.”

“He’s got a bad hip; if you get in a solid kick to the left side, he’s down.”

Sherlock is certain John is rolling his eyes at the darkness. “So why didn’t you?” he challenges.

“Too easy,” is Sherlock’s reply. He shifts just slightly and the pain shoots through him like cold lightning, and he lets out an agonized groan.

“Right,” John replies, but does not go further. “Look, can I--? My hand. . .” Sherlock senses John has rolled a bit on his side, his chest facing Sherlock, and he thrusts his injured hand up and across Sherlock’s pillow, just beyond the top of his head. “I’m worried one of us will roll onto it.”

“I’m not rolling anywhere,” Sherlock assures him. Nonetheless, Sherlock slides down slightly, releasing a grunt of pain, making room for John’s arm. Everything is screaming. Everything stabs.

“Thanks.”

They are both quiet. Sherlock can feel John’s breath stirring the tiny, fine hairs on the outer ring of his ear. His eyes are wide open but there is nothing to see; he tests it by shutting them momentarily but it looks the same either way. His gut is hollow with a longing he cannot discern. He wishes for a blade, a needle, a syringe, a pill, to be punched or choked or fucked hard. His hand hesitantly seeks John’s body, comes to rest with the outer edge of his hand nestled in the hollow where John’s stacked thighs meet.

In immediate response, John’s uninjured hand is on the move, sliding across Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock sucks in a whimper when his forearm gently nudges the injured rib. John passes it by, seeks and finds Sherlock’s already-firm nipple, squeezes a lazy rhythm until Sherlock’s breathing becomes heavier. His cock stirs and thickens and warms. John presses two fingertips into Sherlock’s mouth and he gratefully licks them, swirling his tongue around, tasting body-salts and dirt and faint traces of alcohol left over from the clinic. The fingertips return to Sherlock’s nipple and they are wet and cold and pressing tight and Sherlock whines.

John shifts a bit, his face moving closer to Sherlock’s, and Sherlock turns his head, licks his lips. John tries to rise up on the elbow of his injured arm, hums his pain, and then his slightly-parted lips are on the outer edge of Sherlock’s upper lip, and Sherlock strains to meet him, and lets out a multi-syllabic, “ _Ow-ah-ow_. . .” as his body tries to reject the motion. Their mouths finally align and John’s tongue is all heat, a remarkable muscle, creating a new geometry as it forms shapes that never existed before this moment, describing them against the surfaces inside Sherlock’s mouth: lip, teeth, and receptive, following tongue.

John’s hand is moving again, and now it is teasing the opposite nipple, but the motion of his wrist against Sherlock’s chest is agony. Sherlock groans into John’s mouth, flinches, even as he wills John’s mouth to stay with his, their tongues playing advance-and-retreat in a way that is entirely new.

“Sorry,” John murmurs into Sherlock’s mouth.

“No,” Sherlock replies, then sucks in his breath at another jolt of pain. John does not, this time, apologize.

John moves again, as if he wants to cover Sherlock, but his hand sliding along the pillow makes him groan and he settles for leaning in, his arm at an awkward angle beside Sherlock’s head. His other hand briefly abandons Sherlock’s nipple and then John’s fingers are thrusting in between their tongues, and both men snake their tongue-tips between his fingers. John drags the flat of his tongue across his palm, then returns to their kiss; Sherlock laps the side of John’s tongue repetitively, then closes his lips around John’s bottom lip and sucks.

Sherlock’s brain traces the progress of John’s hand as it slips past his sternum, his belly, his navel, the dark patch of hair he shapes with a razor so as to be pleasing to the eye. John’s hand finds Sherlock’s cock and encircles it, and the gasp it elicits from Sherlock is a torment to his injured chest, and so there follows after the sharp inhalation a deep whimper.

John’s face moves away then, breaking the kiss, and it seems he forgets himself because he makes a sudden motion with his arm and the resulting twinge draws a sharp, “ _Ow_!” from his throat. Sherlock’s hand has up to this point been resting on John’s thigh, his palm and John’s leg now damp with perspiration where the skin meets beneath the blankets. Sherlock slides his hand up and over, finds John’s prick heavy and full and dripping his desire. Sherlock winds long fingers around him, begins to slide the skin forward and back along John’s length, and John huffs hot breath against the side of Sherlock’s face.

John slides his curled hand around Sherlock’s cock down to the base, twists his wrist as he strokes back up toward the crown, catching a pearl of pre-cum gathering there before gliding back down. Sherlock’s hips begin to rock, but it hurts, because his whole body hurts, and the sounds slipping from between his lips are made of pleasure and misery, both at once.

“John,” he gasps, and it is the first time since they first met that he has addressed him by that name, and Sherlock feels flayed. Too open. Too real.

John’s mouth finds the shell of Sherlock’s ear and even as he lets go a small groan of pain, he whispers, “Gorgeous. . .” and somehow he is simultaneously addressing Sherlock and assessing his performance as he pulls and glides along the formidable length of John’s erection. John groans, all pain this time, and Sherlock moves his mouth to receive it. Their parted lips meet and their breath is hot in each other’s mouths.

“It can hurt,” Sherlock murmurs then, “I like when it hurts.”

“Shh,” John answers, and his hand on Sherlock is insistent, skillful, and soon enough Sherlock can sense the dark cloud spreading across his racing brain as he gives over to sensation, the pain that is everywhere—here: sharp; there: aching—and the bliss of John’s hand on him, coaxing him to the point of pure quiet, no thoughts at all. . .a thin veil of nothingness that shades his busy mind for a moment, maybe two, not much longer.

Sherlock’s pelvis is rolling now, and the gyrations are referred up his torso to the stab of the cracked rib, the aches of so, _so_ many bruises, and he is whining, groaning, huffing out his agony, and for a moment he forgets who he is, and where, and all the reasons everything hurts. He inhabits the hurt, and sinks into the pleasure, and warmth spills out of him, radiates through him, and he shivers, and he shouts.

John hisses in his ear, “Yes, gorgeous. . .” and Sherlock remembers he has John in hand, and he gathers enough of his mind to return to his purpose, slipping and pulling and gently twisting. John rocks against him, not just his hips but nearly all of him, and Sherlock wants to turn to him, press their bodies together from shoulder to chest to hip to knee, but the pain in his side is exquisite and he is pinned to the spot. John’s breath is heaving now, his mouth against Sherlock’s jaw, and his inhalations are cold, his exhalations moist, and his damp fingers burrow in Sherlock’s pubic hair, gently scratching the sensitive skin beneath.

“I never—“ Sherlock starts to say, but he bites down on it because John suddenly releases a bones-deep groan and collapses slightly forward, and he comes across Sherlock’s thigh and low belly.

Sherlock slips his hand away, grips the sheet, swipes at the sticky wetness on his skin.

“You never what?”

Sherlock freezes, startled. John’s lips are against his ear, and he is kissing, nuzzling. He is kind.

“I forget,” Sherlock lies, in a low, rolling voice thick with something as close to fatigue as Sherlock ever gets to feel. John presses his nose into the hollow behind Sherlock’s earlobe, drags it along his jaw. Sherlock feels he might fly apart, initiates a mental checklist of the ways in which is body is present, contained, though he does not actually trust it to be true.

John’s movements are slow, his voice is thick and quiet. “You always lie, gorgeous,” he says quietly, matter-of-factly nonetheless. “You lie and lie.”

Sherlock senses a distant twinge of indignation rising up in the back of chest but suppresses it by shifting his shoulder, jolting a current of hot agony through his torso that lands just outside his knee.

“It’s better this way,” Sherlock replies, and he wonders if John is even still awake to hear it.

 

 


	5. One Wednesday

 

Sherlock was collapsed into his leather armchair, cradling a book, shirt buttons screaming for mercy all down the front of his torso-hugging, tailored shirt. John left his wet boots on the landing, hung his coat on the hall tree, nodded when Sherlock looked up at him over the edge of his book. John felt Sherlock’s burning-ice eyes follow him through the lounge to the kitchen as he made his usual beeline for the fridge after work. It struck John that the kitchen table was free of detritus, a very unusual turn of events. He went into the veg drawer which he had designated as his own, No Experiments Allowed zone, and liberated some salami and a small hunk of cheese, took a plate and a paring knife from the dish drainer on the countertop by the sink, and sunk into one of the chairs at the table.

There was a neat stack of newly-printed white paper in the center of the tabletop, held together at the upper left corner with a heavy black clip.

“What’s this? One of your cases?” John asked, not really sounding interested. Sherlock hummed but didn’t look up from his book. John spun the stack of paper with one finger. In the lower right corner was an 8-digit number; the rest of the sheet was blank. John recognized it immediately. He stood so quickly out of his chair it nearly fell over. He thrust his hand down on top of the file as if it might take off running. “Why do you have this?” he demanded.

Sherlock’s mouth turned up in a smug grin that John immediately wanted to smash off him.

“How did you get my personnel record?” John seethed, his voice just below a shout, jaw clenched.

“Have you read it?” Sherlock asked, in a voice so calm it only served to rile John more.

“I don’t need to read it,” John snapped. “I know what’s in it. Have _you_ read it?”

“Captain John H Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, is hereby issued a compulsory discharge. Resettlement benefits will be withheld.”

John slammed his fist down on the table.

“What _are_ you?” he shouted. “No, really, please tell me, I have to know. _What are you_ , for god’s sake?”

“Captain Watson did willfully and against multiple previous orders allow into the British Army medical clinic at Camp Wheeler an Afghan civilian seeking medical treatment (delivery of an infant). Once inside the clinic, the woman brandished and fired a pistol, killing two medics and seriously wounding Captain Watson. Captain Watson’s flagrant disregard for the security of his clinic and the physical safety of soldiers in his command represents a tragic lapse in judgment.”

John stormed the short distance to where Sherlock sat, grabbed him by his shirtfront and dragged him to his feet. “ _Why?_ ” John demanded.

“I was bored,” Sherlock replied, shrugging slightly.

“You’re a monster,” John said evenly. He adjusted his grip on Sherlock’s shirtfront, his face close enough to bite Sherlock’s nose. Or his lip. “I don’t know what _the fuck_ I am doing here,” John shouted, “With _you_!” He released his grip, spun away from Sherlock, picked up a mug full of pens and pencils from Sherlock’s desk and hurled it at the fireplace wall, where it smashed against the tiles. “What am I doing here?” he repeated.

Sherlock opened his mouth slightly and poked his tongue into his cheek, stroked it up and down, giving his answer. He cocked an eyebrow.

“Fuck you,” John uttered, and shook one pointed finger in his face. “You want to know? You think you want to know everything about me? All right, how about this.” John’s feet were firmly planted, but his entire posture conveyed that he could spring at Sherlock at any second; he was taut and practically crackling with electricity. “The last words I said to my father before he died were, ‘piss off, old man.’ When I was at university I fucked a guy I knew was too drunk to consent and left him passed out on the men’s room floor in a pub. And yes, I did have an affair with my brother’s wife while he was still alive, but he was a piece of shit and didn’t deserve her, and she was _very_ grateful to have me.” He waited for this to land. Sherlock’s expression was passive, unreadable, and he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, his shoulders low and relaxed.

John went on, face red, neck straining, veins standing out at his temples. “And what’s not in that file is that for well over a year, I listened to Afghani kids just outside the fence yelling, _English!, English! I’m hungry! I’m hungry!_ Twenty. Hours. A day. Women were dying giving birth to dead babies a hundred yards from my desk—for no reason! And I wrote, and I wrote, until my fingers were bloody, _begging_ that they let us help them, and all I ever got were excuses, and orders not to let them in.” John paused, swallowed hard. Sherlock’s eyes were narrowed but his posture hadn’t changed. “And then the one time— _the one time in my whole_ _career_ —I violated an order for a woman who said she was in labour, with two children hanging onto her skirt, she waits for the end of her fake contraction, and pulls a fucking gun inside the fucking clinic!”

John ran his palms across his face from chin to forehead, washing the memory away.

 “You—“ Sherlock started.

John raised his hand to stop Sherlock talking, looked at the floor. He huffed a heavy sigh, walked straight up the stairs to his room, shut the door, turned the lock.

*

A few hours later, and John was bursting for a piss. He’d half-watched a movie on his laptop, dozed but kept waking up with shuddering jerks from nightmares he forgot as soon as his eyes opened. It was nearing midnight. As he opened his door he heard Sherlock talking, and another voice, a man’s. They were in the lounge. John descended the stairs, glanced over as he passed. Sherlock and the haggard-looking cop John met his first week occupied opposite ends of the sofa, with the television on but the volume low. John passed without a word. When he emerged from the bathroom, the DI had risen to his feet, approached John with arm extended for a handshake.

“Greg Lestrade,” he said, and John shook his hand, firmly, once, glancing past him to Sherlock, who sat cross-legged on the sofa, looking more than a little uncomfortable.

“Yes, I remember. John Watson.”

“I know.” There was an awkward pause, and Lestrade crossed to the kitchen, opened the cupboard and took down a glass, filled it with tap water, crossed back to the lounge, leaning on one hand against the back of the overstuffed armchair.

“Don’t mean to interrupt,” John offered, looking back and forth between the two men. “Just. . .you know. . .” he gestured toward the bathroom. “Bit, ah, late though, isn’t it?”

Lestrade looked puzzled. “Late for what?” He moved again, crossing to set his water glass on Sherlock’s desk even though there was a table beside the chair he’d just left.

“Bringing Sherlock one of your tough cases, I imagine,” John said with a shrug. “Eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night.”

“Is he keeping your calendar, now, Sherlock?” Lestrade asked, and he started to straighten some piles of papers on the desk, lining up their corners, and Sherlock didn’t protest.

John twigged: the cop with his own key, making himself so at home, teasing Sherlock and touching Sherlock’s things without getting a cup thrown at his head. John looked at Sherlock and thought he saw something like pleading in his eyes, which lead John to know his own deduction was a correct one.

John cleared his throat, crossed his arms. “Look, you can stop pissing in corners, mate.” He tilted his head toward Sherlock. “I’ve already had him.”

Lestrade’s face momentarily crumpled, then clenched and began to redden. He snapped a glare at Sherlock, who was instantly on his feet as if he could somehow get ahold of what John had said and dispose of it.

“Greg,” Sherlock pleaded, but Lestrade only shook his head, lips pursed, and strode toward the door.

John could feel the smile contorting his face. Sherlock had repeatedly insisted on raising the stakes, always pushing his finger into open wounds. So. If that was the game he wanted to play, then John was more than pleased to take his turn. Sherlock looked shattered: complete distress from his wobbling chin to his red-rimmed eyes. He didn’t even acknowledge John as he went after Lestrade, pounding down the stairs, calling, “Greg, wait!”

John went to his room and slept like the dead.

*

The next morning, John came downstairs to piss and have a shave before work, and there in the middle of the kitchen table, beside a shimmering, cut-crystal rocks glass, was a bottle of Macallan whisky. The good stuff. Eighteen years old. The burnished gold colour of it, the shape of the bottle. . .it was beautiful. John’s heart ached looking at it. His mouth watered. His hands shook.

He went into the bathroom and did what he must. When he came out, Sherlock was leaning sideways in his bedroom doorway, his eyes sunken and vaguely bruised. A crosshatched pattern of razor-thin, fresh-but-not-bleeding cuts was visible just above the drooping waistband of his pyjama bottoms.

“You look like hell,” John told him, giving him the once-over. “You should eat something.”

Sherlock said nothing, didn’t move. He parted his lips and exhaled, long and slow. He smelled of vanilla, smoke, ginger. . .the faint, sweet burn of alcohol beneath it. He drew his arm from behind him to display another bottle of the scotch, about a third of it already consumed. Sherlock’s smile, when he unfurled it, was crooked.

John felt his teeth grind together. He felt chilled, sweaty. He stepped quickly away, patted his pockets, drew his phone from his trousers, started to scroll.

“Calling your sponsor,” Sherlock intoned. Not a question.

“Shut it, you,” John snarled.

“The shaven-headed one with the expensive aftershave.”

“I said shut it.” John pressed the phone to his ear, shrugged into his coat, grabbed his bag.

Sherlock took a pull from the bottle, grimaced, swallowed.

“He’ll never love you like I do,” Sherlock said sarcastically.

“This isn’t over,” John threatened, and Sherlock shrugged, reeled back into his room. John fled down the stairs.

*

Sherlock stops drinking the Macallan because it coats his tongue and because he can feel it churning, thick and syrupy in his gut. He does sit-ups until he has to run to the toilet and vomit. He showers, turning the water as hot as he can stand, then a bit hotter, and sweats beneath it, his skin mottled red all over. He lies on his bed and pounds his fist onto his thigh until there is a black-purple bruise there in the shape of his hand. He sends three-hundred, eighty-one texts and receives none. Once his head is clearer (late afternoon, soon it will be dark, and then—maybe—John Watson will return), he does a hundred press-ups, then a hundred more, then fifty-six more, then collapses on his belly on his bedroom floor. He rolls up to his forehead, then onto the crown of his head, drawing his body up to kneel, curls tight around himself. He cries into his knees until his chest aches from sobbing. He sends three more texts. Nothing.

John’s noises when he comes in are loud, thumping, determined. Not angry. Not explosive. But he moves with purpose. Sherlock is leaning against the kitchen counter, having washed another bout of vomit down the sink and poured dish soap over it to cover the smell. He is hollow, but the walls of his insides feel coated with honey, and he cannot escape it. He should never have drunk the scotch. He didn’t even like it.

John hangs his coat, carries his bag to the kitchen table. He opens the flap, stretches it wide. His expression when he looks at Sherlock says, _Are you paying attention?_ as loudly as his voice could have. He reaches into the bag, and slaps down a large, amber-coloured prescription bottle. Sherlock can hear the pills rattle against the plastic bottle-walls as it lands with a sharp thwack on the tabletop. John fixes Sherlock’s gaze again. He lifts out a small glass bottle—silver metal top, white paper label—sets it down beside the pills. Finally, a clear plastic bag with biohazard markings on the outside; inside it, so many slim, glittering syringes—probably four dozen, packaged for the clinic. Sherlock shivers, and his racing brain begins to circle the pills, the glass bottle, the syringes, round and round and round. They are all that exists now. He can _hear_ them.

John tosses his bag on the floor, crosses his arms. They stare at each other over the tabletop.

“You went too far,” Sherlock says at last, his words gravelly as they pass through his throat sore from sobbing, from vomiting.

John lowers his eyebrows, disbelieving.

“This. . .” Sherlock says, and his hand waves in the air, a wide half-circle that catches up the two of them, the flat, the walls they smashed each other against, the beds they fucked each other on, all of it. “This was all just between _us_.” He shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have made problems for me with my—“

“Your?” John challenges, leaning his head forward on his neck.

“My boyfriend.”

John nods, slowly, sarcastically, his shoulders in it as well as his head and neck. “Oh, there was a _line_? There was a line not to cross?”

“Yes.”

“And that line was your _boyfriend_.”

“Other people,” Sherlock offers limply. He is mumbling. He is a ghost.

“Oh, other _people_ , was it?” John says, tenting his fingers on the tabletop and leaning closer. His face is a grotesque version of itself lit by the overhead fluorescent.

Sherlock’s fingers are itchy, but on the inside. He presses the back of his hand across his eyes, breathes hard.

John shakes his head. “You think there was any other place for us to end up but right here?” he asks, and Sherlock knows he does not expect a reply. “Look how we met. Think about how we’ve done nothing for months but bash each other’s brains in and have fucking rape-sex in every conceivable manner--”

Sherlock wants to push this away. This is not the discussion he started. He protests “It’s not—“

“What is it? What the fuck is it? Because it feels to me like the end of the fucking world is coming. Is it not? Tell me, gorgeous, tell me right now that this _, right here,_ is not the beginning of the end of everything.”

Sherlock looks hard at John, at the collection of poisons—their own particular poisons—on the table between them.

“I wouldn’t have had to mess with your man, there,” John offers seriously, “if you didn’t keep pushing to know everything. We were better off strangers.” Sudeenly, John rears back, steps around the table, and now he is so close Sherlock can feel John’s heart pounding against his own chest, and John’s spittle lands on his face as he shouts, “Why do you need to know _everything_?! You couldn't have left it alone; you just had to keep pressing. Why do you need to fucking _know_?!”

“Because if I don’t know everything, I’m _useless_!” Sherlock screams back at him, and he rakes his fingernails down his face, his throat, his chest. “ _Knowing_ is all I’m good for.” Sherlock’s knees are giving out. He is going to fall. His head is light. He is going to faint. He grabs on to John’s shoulders, his strong arms, John will hold him up. But John is already stepping away. Sherlock falls forward, braces himself on the back of chair.

John circles the table. He passes it, gets a juice glass from the cupboard and slams it down on the table. He yanks out a chair, sits heavily.

Sherlock is reincorporating, pulling pieces of himself from the air, filing them into place. His gut aches with the whisky he fears he will never be rid of. He sinks down to sit.

John cracks open the whisky bottle and Sherlock sees the frisson pouring down John’s spine at the sound. Sherlock reaches for the plastic prescription bottle, doesn’t bother to read the label, unscrews the cap. He shakes out two matching pairs of large, white, oblong pills. John pours a sloppy glug of the scotch into each glass, pushes the expensive one at Sherlock. Sherlock presses two fingertips, one on each pill, and slides them beside John’s glass, then picks up his own pair, rattles them gently in his palm. He wraps long fingers around the glass in front of him.

“You’re right,” Sherlock says at last, so quiet he can barely hear himself. “It’s the end, coming. The only way out is feet-first.”

In nearly a single motion, John sweeps up the two pills, throws them at the back of his throat, chases them with the whisky.

“Yeah,” he says, grimacing at the alcoholic burn, “I’ll fucking race you."

Sherlock drops the pills on his tongue, covers them with scotch, swallows.

 

-END-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -END- of the STORY! Not of the SERIES!
> 
> Slight re-write made four days after publication, to make it less, uh. . .endy?
> 
> So, more to come. BUT. If you think *this* ends badly. . .

**Author's Note:**

> fuckyeahfightlock.tumblr.com for fight-y goodness and related bloodsport.  
> PoppyAlexander-fic.tumblr.com for other fic updates and things that catch my fancy.


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